“His reasons, however,” the Master said, “will involve his needs. Whatever they are—whether those stated or a wholly different set—he has them, and his asking for help is proof that he has needs; and what has needs has limits.”
“In other words,” I said, “because he’s trying to get people to do something—for some reason—he needs them to do it.”
“At the very least,” the Master said, “he needs the process of asking them. Beyond that we cannot, I think, advance just yet.”
Euglane said: “Can we advance on another front? Let’s say Folla didn’t do this thing. To Cornelia, I mean. Let’s say some human being did it. Can we begin to see who that is?” He turned to me. “Knave, you say you believe it’s not Harris. I agree with you; had he done it, even without his own knowledge, there would be traces in his attitudes and reactions I believe I could see.”
“He didn’t,” I said. “But I have no idea who the Hell did.”
Hilda sighed. “People,” she said, “can be so horrible.”
And that, I’m afraid, was the level of analysis we reached. We spent a lot of time trying to find a point of entry, but we didn’t arrive.
It took Mirella to locate one. Somehow, I was not wildly surprised.
PART THREE
JOSEPHSON JUNCTION
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I spent a couple of days talking to the people who’d been Cornelia Rasczak’s patients. I won’t bother you with it, because not a minute of it ever turned out to be useful to anything. I wasn’t bored—I met some interesting people, and some good ones—but nothing much got done.
And the morning after I’d finished the last of the talks— late enough that the breakfast dishes had been washed, wiped and put away, and I was sitting with a third cup of Sumatra Mandheling coffee, trying to decide on a next move that actually made sense—the phone blipped at me. I put the cup back in its saucer, reached across and said: “Gerald Knave. Hello.”
“Gerald,” Mirella said. “I didn’t wake you up or anything?”
I was going to have to stop her using that name on me, one day. “I’ve been up for hours,” I said. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing, which is why I’m calling,” she said. “Absolutely nothing—this is my day to be off. I thought maybe you didn’t know that.”
“Didn’t have the faintest idea,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Happens every week,” she said. “And I have thought of something.” Before I could say a word she went on: “Now look: I have not-repeat-not changed my mind. Do not get yourself an idea. But if you’re ever going to get it certain that our boy is Mr. X, you are going to have to junk every other possibility. Only sensible, right?”
“Right,” I said. “I think.”
“And I have got a possibility for you,” she said. “Something you maybe didn’t think of yet.” A small pause. “Not that you wouldn’t think of it, you know—by yourself. But maybe not yet.”
I grinned into the phone. “Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
“There is a price on it,” she said. “Buy me a lunch.”
“I thought you were dieting,” I said.
“When I think about it,” she said. “Right now, I am not thinking about it. On a day off, who would?”
“Who indeed?” I said, and we arranged a time and place.
No new ideas his time, and nothing fancy, but Mirella said she knew a deli that actually stocked edible food. A place called, with typical Ravenal flair, Old-Fashioned Food.
When we were seated in a small booth at the back of the small, dimly-lit room, she said: “Maybe you don’t know much about deli stuff. It is not like regular food.”
“It is regular food,” I said. “Or it ought to be. I have been in delis on six different planets—including the old Original. Where, by the way, things have gone downhill; good corned beef is hard to find.”
“Well,” she said, “pardon me. Here the corned beef is fair. Maybe there is better, but not in City Two.”
A Totum rolled up at that point, and we told it to find some corned beef on rye, two largish piles of potato salad, and a couple of soft drinks. “They have a thing here called a Celery Tonic,” Mirella said. “You should try it.” I told her celery tonic was traditional deli food almost anywhere, though only on Earth was the original (called Charlie Brown’s) still sometimes available.
“We make do,” Mirella said. “Earth we are not, and maybe a good thing. But we make do.” She paused. “And the pickles here, you like deli, you have got to try.”
That convinced me, even before the Totum went away to find our food, that the place really was a deli. A customer of any kind of place might boast about its main dish, or its ambiance; only a deli customer boasts about pickles.
We chatted about nothing much for a bit—the weather, small local news—and, after the food had arrived and Mirella had disposed of one enormous bite of her sandwich—having slathered the poor thing with enough mustard to paint a small room—she said: “That idea. Now, I don’t want you to think I am changing my mind, because I am not changing it.”
I’d been a little lighter on the mustard. I swallowed a bite— and if it wasn’t Earth quality, it was a very close cousin—and said: “Understood. You just want me to hurry up and eliminate everything else, so I can agree with you.”
She gave me a big grin. “You got it,” she said. “On the nose.” Another bite. In a minute or so she said: “So I’ll tell you. If Harris France did this, where is the other beamer?”
I blinked. “If France killed her, why would there be another beamer?”
“Because he is not stupid,” Mirella said. “The door chain, the bolts, the windows—who knows what happened? But another beamer, he would have to have. The woman has a hole burned in—she did not get it leaning too far over a stove.”
“There was a beamer right there,” I said. “Clean. Fully loaded. Unfired.”
She nodded. The sandwich was half gone. She took a bite of pickle, nodded with satisfaction, and said: “So maybe he fiddled his own beamer. Not hard to do. We said that already. But he had to see, somebody shot the woman. Where is the beamer he wants us to think she was shot with?”
“The killer took it away with him,” I said.
She gave me a very overplayed scornful laugh. “This is not a civilian,” she said. “He has to know better. He can get a beamer very easy, not on the books anywhere. He drops it right there, so it points to somebody else, he is not so completely on the spot. He says the killer took it away, it is just words. He shows another beamer, he has got something.”
“Maybe he didn’t think of it,” I said.
“Your friend Euglane,” she said. “By him, a nut would be too stressed to think of anything. But in real life maybe not. Some things he doesn’t think of. Some he does. The doors and windows, maybe not. But the damn gun? He is using the damn gun. Something has to occur to him.”
I nodded. My own sandwich was disappearing rapidly. I tried the pickle. Mirella was right: the place was a real deli. I put Old-Fashioned Food on my list of places to return to.
“Where would he get the spare beamer?” I said.
She shrugged. “Anywhere,” she said. “Anybody can buy a beamer. Or a slug gun. But you buy it legally, it is test-fired— for the slug gun, any bullet later on is going to be identified, the test firing is on record. For a beamer not so tight—burn pattern, deductive temp picture, things like that. But the test firing is on record; it will anyhow, at least, give you an idea.” The sandwich was gone. She took a forkful of potato salad. “So he didn’t buy it legally. It is maybe a little tough for a civilian to find an illegal beamer—an illegal gun any kind. But for this guy, no trouble at all, he would know how, where and who.”
I nodded. “So he buys an illegal beamer someplace—”
“Or he gets one like a favor from somebody,” she said. “It has to be there are people want to do favors for a Homicide Detective-Colonel.”
/> “He shoots Cornelia Rasczak with it,” I said. “And then what?”
“Then,” Mirella said, “I have no damn idea. It has to be there. To show he didn’t use his own and gimmick it. And it is not there. We looked: believe it.”
“Interesting,” I said. “And if he didn’t do it—” I thought for a second. “If he didn’t do it, the problem doesn’t exist. Whoever got in and out of the place took the beamer with him.”
“Sure,” Mirella said. “Somebody got in and out, there’s no problem. Only somebody didn’t get in and out, because there is no way.”
“An alien being could manage it,” I said.
“A what?”
I explained. Briefly. Mirella nodded, her face perfectly sober.
“Also a thing from the spirit world,” she said. “Why not? You are grabbing at some very small straws, Gerald.”
“Knave,” I said.
She grinned. “You want to spoil all my fun?”
I said: “But would an alien being know where to get an illegal beamer?”
“Maybe there is an alien weapons supplier,” Mirella said. “A Fence from Beyond.”
“What the Hell,” I said. “Anything’s possible.”
“It would be your thing, then,” Mirella said, “to eliminate the possibility—to find out where is the other beamer, and where he got it. Right?”
I took in some potato salad. “Not exactly,” I said. “There’s no way. If he got rid of it, he did a good job, and finding it is a job for six hundred investigators and two years. It might be loose atoms by now, swept up somewhere and thoroughly trashed.”
“So where did he get it?”
I shrugged. “Anywhere. If somebody did him a favor, how can I trace it? How can anybody trace it? If he found a fence with a loose beamer for sale—same question. Mirella, who’s going to tell me he sold a loose beamer to a police officer? Who’s going to tell anybody, ever?”
She shrugged back at me. “Got to be a way,” she said. “People do things, they leave traces. Traces can be found.”
“To be perfectly frank,” I said, “I prefer alien beings.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
And it was alien beings I was at work on, late that afternoon. This time, it wasn’t at the Playtime Wispies offices, but back in his house; the Master phoned me and said he’d had an idea. When I heard it, I knew I should have had the same idea—weeks before.
“Gerald,” he said, sitting comfortably in front of his wall of piranhas, “it is possible that Folla did not, in fact, move your ship.”
I stared at him. “I’m here,” I said. “I was away the Hell somewhere else. How did this happen?”
“There is a laboratory effect,” he said. “I have been laggard in remembering its existence, but it presents interesting possibilities.”
“A laboratory effect,” I said.
“Quite an ancient one,” he said. “It was known before the Clean Slate War, in fact, though never quite explained. Mathematical treatments existed, but a mathematical treatment is a description, not an explanation.”
I nodded. “All right,” I said. “What’s the effect?”
“Gerald,” he said, “have you ever heard of a Josephson junction?”
I closed my eyes and swore. A long minute of silence went creeping by.
Then I raised my voice in song. It’s a long song, but you might as well have all of it, and here it is.
Josephson Junction’s the Hell of a spot—
First you’re there, and then you’re not.
Want to reach an inf’nite speed?
Josephson J. is all you need.
CHORUS:
Josephson Junction—
What a function
Went on a little trip one day,
All by way of the Josephson J—
Sixty microns, quite a dash—
Did it all in one quick flash.
T’other day I gave a holler—
Lost my dawg, he slipped his collar.
Found him in far Ioway—
Dawg fell through the Josephson J
Gal done left me Friday night—
Took mah truck, blinked out o’ sight.
Chasin’ for her just won’t pay—
She winked out by Josephson J.
Oh, I’d go to find my gal,
Bring her back to th’ old corral—
But she might be any place
In sixteen-dimensioned space.
Should’ve used electron glue,
Kept her by me, tied and true.
Now my sky is always grey—
All the fault of the Josephson J.
Josephson Junction’s the Hell of a spot—
First you’re there, and then you’re not.
Junction took my gal away—
Found my dawg, though—Josephson J.
Master Higsbee said, in a voice as hushed as I’d ever heard from him: “What is that? Gerald, what is that?”
“That,” I said, “is Josephson Junction. A song, damn it.”
He shook his head, slowly. “It is not,” he said. “Once it may have been a song. After your rendition of it, it has become something else, something for which our language, I am very much afraid, has no name.”
I do not sing that badly. I don’t think I do. “I have no idea who wrote it,” I said. “That makes it a folk song, I suppose—I’ve never seen an author listed. But I have it on a music tape— some late-Twentieth songs. Performed by a woman named Laura Quink, one of the few guitarists I can stand to listen to. The damn tape is filed on my ship—I was even thinking about playing it, for check, when I was being lost. But I didn’t feel like Charming just then.”
A very slow nod. “I had not known there was a song about a Josephson junction,” he said. “I had not, in fact, known that the effect was popularly known among the ancients. It was something of a rarity.”
“An electron appears at point A,” I said. “On one side of the junction. Traveling in a given direction, at a given speed—defined within what were called quantum limits of accuracy. It then appears at point B, a measurable distance away, traveling in the same direction and at the same speed—without having crossed the intervening space.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is quite firmly established that this is so. Mathematical treatments do indeed exist. The effect never appeared, so to speak, in the macrocosm; it was thought of as a purely quantum effect, you understand. But it occurred to me that this might not, in fact, be the case.”
“That Folla might have found some large, economy-sized Josephson junction—found it or made it—and pushed my ship through it, just like an electron. From point A, eleven thousand light years from human habitation, to Ravenal. Point B.”
“Without crossing the intervening space,” the Master said. “Hence, without occupying time in its passage; there would have been no passage, simply a—discontinuity. The notion clears up several difficulties at once.”
“Sure it does,” I said. “Folla didn’t have a new, instantaneous theory for space-four, because he didn’t push the ship through space-four. He pushed it through—his space.”
“Or some other, but not ours,” the Master said. “And, as the transfer of your ship was the only sign that Folla could in fact affect physical objects in our space-time—and was a great bother to orderly thought on that account—we might now theorize, more simply, that he did not so affect physical objects; the effect does not involve our space-time, and might have been managed as a surround, so to speak, for your ship, without touching the ship at all.”
“Like digging a hole under it and watching it fall through,” I said. “He never had to affect the ship at all, directly—if he could dig the hole.”
“Exactly,” the Master said. “It is no more than a vagrant theory—it is of course impossible of establishment by any means I can imagine—but it arranges matters very satisfactorily in order.”
Two new ideas in one day. A very unusual day.
CHAPTER TW
ENTY-SIX
Three new ideas, in fact—Euglane, I found out when I got back to my hotel, had left a message.
I should have programmed my pocket piece to accept forwarding—but it’s one of the things I keep forgetting. When I got the message to phone him, I cursed a bit, and punched in his number.
He didn’t answer phones as quickly as he answered doorbell-announces; the thing blipped three times before his slightly-gruff tenor voice said: “Yes? I am Euglane.”
“Gerald Knave,” I said. “Returning your—”
“I have spoken with Harris this afternoon,” he said. “I called you at once; he is reporting dreams that may mean something.”
I took a deep breath. “Don’t tell me Folla has been popping up to ask Harris France for help.”
“Not at all,” he said. “He has had three successive, and very odd, dreams involving a dog. A small dog.”
This did not strike me as spectacular. “People do dream about pets,” I said. “Even small pets. We mentioned that, after all. Disposed of it, I thought. If the dog wasn’t named Folla, or Dube, it’s not—”
“The dog has informed him that he did in fact commit the murder of which he stands accused,” Euglane said. “It has told him to confess his crime.”
“All right,” I said. “Maybe he just can’t stand the uncertainty, and his mind made itself up, and is taking this way of letting him know about it.”
“It has told him,” Euglane said. “That is, this dog has told him—that he shot Cornelia with his own beamer, and that he reloaded the beamer and recalibrated the shot counter.”
“You said he couldn’t have done that,” I said.
“So I did, and he could not,” Euglane said. “I have told Harris, very clearly, that the thing is impossible, even if he were sleepwalking—for which, in any case, there has never been any evidence.”
“Well,” I said, “he doesn’t have to believe a dog in a dream.”
“But he feels he does,” Euglane said. “The dog has told him that his confession is the only way in which he can retain the favor of his—examiners.”
I thought about that for a couple of seconds. I had two questions.
Alienist Page 13